The guys working on the client library are doing encryption at the moment, they're also working with Matrix.org and Purism for the librem5 project so maybe they'll end up making a daemon of some kind too.

Sounds wonderful. At the moment I will stay with XMPP but am testing matrix everynow and then.

After being a little frustrated about the state of Matrix clients for Sailfish OS... I had an idea:

Say we had a XMPP server running (somewhere on the internet) that acts as a Matrix client. That server would connect to a Matrix account, checking the contacts and rooms the Matrix user has. Then that server would create a XMPP fake user of each contact and room and repost all messages that appear to your personal XMPP user and back.

On Sailfish you then could just connect to your personal XMPP account and have all functionality like chatting in rooms, chatting with contacts and getting everything nicely styled on standard Sailfish GUI with notifications etc... Rooms appear as a contact on contact list etc...

Only Matrix management functions like creating rooms, changes to user profile and alike would not work from Sailfish. You would have to do this on another Matrix client, OR your fake server would provide an "admin bot" contact that you give commands via text message, yeah.

That way you would be totally independent from Jolla implementing stuff, had MUC and so on. You would not even code one line of Sailfish compatible code. Ok, encryption would break, as your server would have to decrypt and send to XMPP unencrypted, as Sailfish/Telepathy does not implement it. But fück it. I even think that matrix.org already provides a XMPP-Matrix bridge - just the other way round. But it could serve as a guide line when implementing the 'fake' server. Sure, native implementation would be better, but I'd prefer having a functional solution this century.